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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Leostream Pushes Connection Broker 6.0

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Leostream announced late last week a new version of its vendor-neutral connection broker. The Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 features native support for Citrix XenServer, along with additional highlights including extended monitor support, an enhanced Web interface, more powerful USB device management and reporting capabilities.

The Leostream Connection Broker, which is delivered as a virtual appliance, is the software management layer that ties desktop images in the data center to users’ thin client, laptop, desktop or Web interfaces. With it, enterprises can provide end-users with a virtual desktop experience equal or superior to that of traditional desktops. End-users can access their virtual desktop from any machine, no matter where they are located, due to the Connection Broker’s ability to direct users to their own virtual desktop image.

For IT, the Leostream Connection Broker allows managers to maximize the virtualization of existing resources by easily integrating an array of clients, back-end systems and viewers. In addition, management can rest assured that its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is secure. The Leostream Connection Broker integrates with existing authentication and security protocols without changes, providing a rich set of policies for exact implementation of business rules for users and machines.

With its new version, the Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 offers native support for Citrix XenServer, easily installed as a virtual appliance on Citrix XenServer 5. As a result, enterprises can now create a VDI entirely on XenServer. This new capability builds on Leostream’s previous Citrix offerings. This includes Leostream’s long-standing Citrix Ready verified support for XenServer Centers and the more recent addition of XenApp Integration for delivering desktops and applications side-by-side. With Leostream, organizations can deliver Citrix desktops simultaneously with other virtual, physical or bladed desktops or Terminal Server sessions, create pools of Citrix desktops or applications for delivery to different groups of users, and assign desktop and application pools based on end-user policy and location.

The Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 also provides extended monitor support. Virtual desktops can be split or spanned across multiple screens with no degradation of performance. This enables IT to provide virtual desktops to end-users accustomed to multiple monitors.

Additional enhancements in the Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 include:

  • More Powerful USB Device Management: End-users can attach and employ USB devices on virtual desktops with the same ease-of-use as physical desktops, while IT management has complete visibility and control over which USB devices are permitted;
  • Enhanced Reporting: IT can now monitor resource usage; and
  • New Integration with Syslog Servers: New integration features allow for more effective compliance and auditing.

EMC To Buy Configuresoft

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EMC today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Configuresoft, a provider of server configuration, change and compliance management software. The transaction is expected to close in June, subject to customary closing conditions and is not expected to have a material impact to revenue or EPS for the full 2009 fiscal year.

The announcement builds upon an already successful OEM relationship with Configuresoft. EMC entered this OEM agreement in mid-2008 and the resulting products of EMC Server Configuration Manager and EMC Configuration Analytics Manager are currently helping customers quickly adopt virtualization, dramatically cut costs, monitor policy and security compliance, and ensure governance, risk and compliance (GRC) across their infrastructures.

Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) and Configuration Intelligent Analytics (CIA) — which will continue to be known as EMC Server Configuration Manager and Configuration Analytics Manager based upon the OEM agreement — help companies achieve and maintain continuous operational, regulatory, and security compliance across their data centers. The solutions are able to quickly detect, prioritize and correct configuration compliance issues and help companies implement an automated, continuous enterprise compliance posture. Rich analytics offer customers a powerful dashboard for viewing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and provide visibility across network and server domains.

Taking this one step further, by offering powerful integrations with EMC’s network change and configuration management and service management solutions — as well the company’s automated root-cause analysis and application dependency mapping software — customers gain total visibility and control across their physical and virtual IT infrastructure.

Diskeeper Debuts V-locity, A Virtual Platform Performance Optimizer

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Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity, a new virtual platform performance optimizer designed to maximize server speeds on Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper product line, the upward move to develop V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating VHD “bloat”. This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the VHD, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

Diskeeper was the first ever defragmenter certified for Hyper-V, garnering notable praise from Microsoft* citing that “After independent testing, we found that Diskeeper’s automatic defragmenter not only exploits Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V capabilities but also is designed to meet mission-critical expectations in a virtualized environment.” Now V-locity has taken that technology to an all new level, bringing the first ever virtual platform performance optimizer to the enterprise.

V-locity consists of two components:

  • V-locity Host installed on Windows Server 2008 running Hyper-V
  • V-locity Guest installed on Windows virtual machines

Release: Karesansui 1.0

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The Karesansui project has released version 1.0 of its open source virtualization management application.

While version 1.0 only supports the Xen hypervisor, the developers plan to support KVM and other virtualization systems in the future.  Administrators can install a virtual guest OS, boot VMs, shutdown VMs, and reach the virtual console directly through a Web browser interface.

The application is licensed under the GPL and LGPL and uses open source components such as: Python, libvirt, webpy, flup, lighttpd, psycopg2, tightvncviewer, jquery, jquery.form.  The web interface also has a RESTful architecture allowing for other applications to interact with it over HTTP.

Karesansui is available to download and you can also find an installation tutorial as well.  If you are looking for screenshots, you can find them here.

Desktone Virtual-D Platform for DaaS Gets An Upgrade

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Desktone today announced significant new capabilities for its Desktone Virtual-D Platform. The enhancements enable service providers to more easily and cost-effectively scale their Desktone-powered desktops as a service (DaaS) offerings, while helping end-customers quickly benefit from virtual desktops.

Desktone’s Virtual-D Platform enables organizations to quickly realize the cost and flexibility benefits of virtual desktop computing without upfront CAPEX investments. Uniquely designed along two tiers (service provider and enterprise), it lets enterprises keep their data secure within their own network, and maintain ownership and control over their Windows OS images, applications and all relating licensing, while outsourcing the physical data center infrastructure powering their virtual desktops to service providers.

The new Virtual-D Platform capabilities enable Desktone partners to efficiently scale and operate their services at attractive price points. They include:

  • Multi-tenancy: Exposes all the previously-existing, rich multi-tenancy capabilities of the underlying platform, making it easier to create, manage and monitor multiple customers on the same shared infrastructure. It is designed to support tenant isolation across hosted and on-premises infrastructure, including environments with stringent security requirements.
  • Multi-data center: Enables service providers to leverage their global data center footprint to support widely distributed enterprise environments and deliver high availability/disaster recovery offerings. Enterprises benefit from improved user experiences over internally implemented VDI, since virtual desktops can be closer to users, and from reliable, continuous service.
  • Virtual-D Service Center: A single management web console for service operators to create, manage and monitor many customers on common network, storage, and virtualization infrastructure.
  • Improved hosting economics: Giving service providers the ability to choose the virtual desktop building block technologies best suited to their business is a fundamental tenet of the Desktone platform. Service providers now have the option to use a VMware ESX or ESXi environment, with or without Virtual Center, to lower their operational costs.

Enterprise customers can take advantage of the following enhancements to the Virtual-D Platform:

  • Rapid service on-boarding: Enterprise administrators can easily upload virtual desktop images to their service provider’s infrastructure to accelerate DaaS implementations and time-to-value.
  • Global language support: Multi-national organizations can more easily leverage the Desktone Virtual-D Portal—a self-service, browser-based tool that allows end-users to access and manage their hosted virtual desktops. The portal now includes support for twelve languages.
  • Delegated Administration: Roles and permissions can be assigned at different levels to desktop administration, helpdesk and management staff, and—at the end-customer’s sole discretion—back to the service provider. All desktop management and desktop access remains under the end-customer’s user authentication authority (e.g., Active Directory).

Desktone-powered DaaS solutions are available through select Desktone service provider partners.

Microsoft Equips IPTV Platform Mediaroom With Virtualization Support

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Microsoft today launched Microsoft Mediaroom with virtualization, making it the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform to offer virtualization support. Mediaroom with virtualization can deliver up to a sixfold reduction in the number of physical servers required to support a full-featured IPTV service, significantly reducing hardware and management costs and speeding time to market for Mediaroom customers by up to three weeks.

With virtualization support, it is possible to deploy and operate a full Mediaroom-powered TV service for up to 30,000 subscriber homes per market using fewer than 10 physical servers. Even for deployments of greater than 30,000 subscriber homes, a mix of virtualized and dedicated servers can still provide efficiency benefits.

Mediaroom with virtualization offers the full functionality of Microsoft’s award-winning IPTV platform including video on demand, DVR Anywhere for viewing and managing recorded shows in any room, and Mediaroom Anytime for viewing of previously aired programs or restarting currently airing shows without any preplanning or prior digital video recording. Other capabilities include high-definition video for live and on-demand content, multiview, instant channel zapping, and TV applications that support rich interactivity and seamless blending of Web content and services with broadcast TV.

To power virtualization in Mediaroom, Microsoft is using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization technology.